This cepstrogram shows Lady Gaga’s most streamed song Shallow (featuring Bradley Cooper) from the album A Star is Born soundtrack.
Lady Gaga’s first album, The Fame, was released in August 2008 and immediately shot her to stardom. From that moment Gaga was on of the biggest artists in the world. Lady Gaga is one of the biggest pop artists in the world and is known for her musical range. After her debut album, she has released a variety of musical projects, ranging from mainstream pop to folk and jazz. I am very much
This aim of this website is to display my research on Lady Gaga’s full discography. The albums I will compare are The Fame, Born This Way, Artpop, Cheek To Cheek (with Tony Bennett), Joanne, A Star Is Born Soundtrack and Chromatica. To study the musical differences, I will first rank the albums by commercial success by looking at the Spotify streams each album has. I will then look at the musical differences of each album and conclude if there is a relationship between the the commercial success and musical elements, such as energy and valence.
Before studying the musical elements of Lady Gaga’s music to compare it to the commercial success, I have to rank all albums based on their success. I first calculated the total amount of streams of each album on Spotify on February 28, 2021. Then I divided this by the number of songs on the album to compare all songs equally. My ranking will therefore be based on the average streams per song on each album.
The only issue with this method of calculation is that all albums were released at different points in time, so some albums have naturally had more time to be streamed. I have not found a reliable source that provided me with data that can be fully equally compared.
This plot shows the combined energy and valence levels of all Lady Gaga’s albums. This gives a general idea of where the energy and valence lie. I still want to figure out how to add color to the plot to distinguish each album by one color, but I have not been able to do so yet.
This histogram shows that there is a quite a big difference in energy between all the albums. Cheek To Cheek scores quite a bit lower than Chromatica for example, which is logical because the it is a jazz record consisting of more slower, chiller songs. Chromatica, on the contrary, has only upbeat songs and scores very high on the energy ranking. This rule seems to apply for all her pop albums. Artpop, The Fame, and Born This Way score much higher than Cheek To Cheek (jazz) and A Star Is Born. Joanne is kind of a mix, because it has both low and higher energy scores. The album consists of both upbeat and slower songs, as it is a mix of pop, folk/country and rock elements.
I have not been able to draw a conclusion as there are more musical elements I want to compare.